Bon Appetit magazine – article on Apeel “Mushy Avocados No More”

“There are Solu­tions that will save every­body.” The mes­sage, paint­ed a robin’s-egg blue and out­lined in red, is scrawled across the wall of the mak­ers lab of a school I’m tour­ing with my son. I don’t hear anoth­er word the guide says. I’m too mem­o­rized by hope, the idea that the var­i­ous mess­es in which we find our­selves are not the endgame. For an after­noon, a week, a month, I’m an island of opti­mism. Of course, that does­n’t last. Bad news pierces the bub­ble. The most recent decade saw more green­house gas emis­sions than the one before; the curve is going in the wrong direc­tion. But I return again and again to this notion: There are solu­tions that will save everybody.

James Rogers, founder of the pro­duce preser­va­tion com­pa­ny Apeel, must believe it too. He did­n’t have a mak­ers’ lab when he was in school, but week­end trips to the local hard­ware store were enough to fire his imag­i­na­tion. At first, his visions cen­tered on the democ­ra­ti­za­tion of clean ener­gy, but then one day, dri­ving past some par­tic­u­lar­ly lush farm­land, he thought about the mag­ni­tude of food waste and how hard it is for “grow­ers to opti­mize their har­vest prac­tices that pro­duce can stay on the vine longer in order to reach full nutri­tion­al and fla­vor poten­tial,” as he puts it now.

The full arti­cle was orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished in Bon Appetit Magazine.